Justine

I’ve always had a weird relationship with my name.

Just one letter separates Justine (my name) from Justin (everyone else’s name). Justin as in Bieber, as in Timberlake, as in Trudeau. In 1985, the year I was born, Justin was the 15th most popular boy’s name. Justine, meanwhile, came in at a comparatively dismal 265 on the girl’s list. I’ve been misspelled and mistaken my whole life.

Decades of chip-on-my-shoulder wallowing about my name has left me keenly alert to appearances of my name in culture. There’s Justine Henin, the Belgian tennis pro, Justine Bateman of Family Ties, and, yes, even first-wave YouTube celebrity iJustine.

In literature, meanwhile, there’s Lawrence Durrell’s Justine and Justine by the Marquis de Sade. Given the book’s setting, I’m saving Durrell for a future trip to Egypt, but I picked up Sade while in Paris last month – an English translation with a ridiculous Harlequin cover.  Reading it, first in France and then back in New York, was an exercise in squirmy, shameful, “I hope people on the train aren’t reading this over my shoulder” discomfort. If you’ve ever wondered whether something written hundreds of years ago can still scandalize – the answer is yes. I thought I’d seen so much HBO, listened to so much hip-hop, and spent so much time living deep in Brooklyn that nothing could shock me. Alas.

Sade wrote Justine in two weeks while imprisoned in Paris, and the speed shows. In his world, everyone is a monster or a fool: the monster waxes poetic about the joys of libertinism, the fool gets viciously tortured/abused/raped by said monster, rinse and repeat for 200 pages. Justine the protagonist (and Justine, the reader) cannot get a break.

It’s hard to know what to think of Sade in 2017. For a long time, his thinking was fashionable – pornography for the philosophical set. It was considered prudish to turn away from it. And meaning does abound here – the idea that virtue is futile, that human nature is cruel, that we must adapt in order to survive. But, today, it’s impossible to read Justine without thinking of real world abuses of power for sexual gain – impossible not to think of Roger Ailes or Bill O’Reilly or Donald Trump. In our post-Weinstein age, female suffering feels more tangible than theoretical.

Bottom line – my name deserves better. The world (ok, maybe it’s just me) needs a Justine with agency. A Justine in control. A Justine who wins in the end. Someone please write a book with that kind of Justine. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, I’m looking at you.